“ ‘Hold tight to the rail,’ Jim’s voice said in Nora’s ear.” (Page 67.)
| Jim and Wally] | [Frontispiece |
JIM AND WALLY
By
MARY GRANT BRUCE
Author of “Mates at Billabong,” “Norah of Billabong,” etc.
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
LONDON, MELBOURNE AND TORONTO
1917
CONTENTS
| CHAP. | | PAGE |
| I | War | 9 |
| II | Yellow Envelopes | 30 |
| III | When the Boys come Home | 43 |
| IV | To Ireland | 53 |
| V | Into Donegal | 74 |
| VI | Of Little Brown Trout | 98 |
| VII | Lough Anoor | 113 |
| VIII | John O’Neill | 131 |
| IX | Pins and Pork | 147 |
| X | The Rock of Doon | 161 |
| XI | Northward | 183 |
| XII | Ass-Cart versus Motor | 197 |
| XIII | The Cave among the Rocks | 213 |
| XIV | A Family Matter | 229 |
| XV | Plans of Campaign | 242 |
| XVI | The Fight in the Dawn | 248 |
CHAPTER I
WAR
“For one the laurel, one the rose, and glory for them all,
All the gallant gentlemen who fight and laugh and fall.”
Margery Ruth Betts.
THE trench wound a sinuous way through the sodden Flanders mud. Underfoot were boards; and then sandbags; and then more boards, added as the mud rose up and swallowed all that was put down upon it. Some of the last-added boards had almost disappeared, ground out of sight by the trampling feet of hundreds of men: a new battalion had relieved, three nights before, the men who had held that part of the line for a week, and when a relief arrives, a trench becomes uncomfortably filled, and the ground underfoot is churned into deep glue. It was more than time to put down another floor; to which the only objection was that no more flooring material was available, and had there been, no one had time to fetch it.
It was the second trench. Beyond it was another, occupied by British soldiers: beyond that again, a mass of tangled barbed-wire, and then the strip of No-Man’s Land dividing the two armies—a strip ploughed up by shells and scarred with craters formed by the bursting of high explosives. Here and there lay rifles, and spiked German helmets, and khaki caps; but no living thing was visible save the cheeky Flemish sparrows that hopped about the quiet space, chirping and twittering as if trying to convince themselves and everybody else that War was hundreds of miles away. The sparrows carried out this pleasant deception every morning, abandoning the attempt as soon as the first German gun began what the British soldiers, disagreeably interrupted in frying bacon, termed “the breakfast hate.” Then they retreated precipitately to the sparrow equivalent to a dug-out, to meditate in justifiable annoyance on the curious ways of men.
In the second trench the men were weary and heavy-eyed, and even bacon had scant attractions for them. It was their first experience of trench-life complicated by shell-fire, and since their arrival the enemy had been “hating” with a vigour that seemed to argue on his part a peculiar sourness of temper. Now, after two days of incessant artillery din and three nights of the strenuous toil that falls upon the trenches with darkness, the new men bore evidence of exhaustion. Casualties had been few, considering the violent nature of the bombardment; but to those who had never before seen Death come suddenly, an even slighter loss would have been horrifying. The ceaseless nerve-shattering roar of the big guns pounded in their brains long after darkness had put an end to the bombardment; their brief snatches of sleep were haunted by the white faces of the comrades with whom they would laugh and fight and work no more. They were stiff and sore with crouching under the parapets and in the narrow dug-outs; dazed with noise, sullen with the anger of men who have been forced to endure without making any effort to hit back. But their faces had hardened under the test. A few were shrinking, “jumpy,” useless: but the majority had stiffened into men. When the time for hitting back came, they would be ready.
Dawn on the fourth morning found them weary enough, but, on the whole, in better condition than they had been two days earlier. They were getting used to it; and even to artillery bombardment “custom hath made a property of easiness.” The first sense of imminent personal danger had faded with each hour that found most of them still alive. Discipline and routine, making each officer and man merely part of one great machine, steadied them into familiar ways, even in that unfamiliar setting. And above all was satisfaction that after months of slow training on barrack-square and peaceful English fields they were at last in the middle of the real thing—doing their bit. It had been conveyed to them that they were considered to be shaping none too badly: a curt testimonial, which, passing down the line, had lent energy to a hard night of rebuilding parapets, mending barbed-wire, and cleaning up battered sections of trench. They were almost too tired to eat. But the morning—so far—was peaceful; the sunlight was cheery, the clean breeze refreshing. Possibly to-day might find the Hun grown weary of hating so noisily. There were worse things than even a trench in Flanders on a bright April morning.
Jim Linton sat on a small box outside his dug-out, drinking enormous quantities of tea, and making a less enthusiastic attempt to demolish the contents of an imperfectly heated tin of bully beef. He was bare-headed, owing to the fact that a portion of shrapnel had removed his cap the day before, luckily without damaging the head inside it. Mud plastered him from neck to heels. He was a huge boy, well over six feet, broad-shouldered and powerful; and the bronze which the sun of his native Australia had put into his face had been proof against the trench experiences that had whitened English cheeks, less deeply tanned.
Another second lieutenant came hastily round a traverse and tripped over his feet.
“There’s an awful lot of you in a trench!” said the new-comer, recovering himself.
“Sorry,” said Jim. “I can’t find any other place to put them; they will stick out. Never mind, the mud will bury them soon; it swallows them if I forget to move them every two minutes. Come and have breakfast.”
“I want oceans of tea,” said Wally Meadows, dragging a biscuit-tin from the dug-out, perching it precariously on a small board island in the mud, and seating himself with caution. He glanced with disfavour at the beef-tin. “Is that good?”
“Beastly,” Jim answered laconically. “Smith’s strong point is not cookery. It’s faintly warm and exceedingly tough; and something with moisture in it seems to have happened to the biscuits. But the tea is topping. I told Smith to bring another supply presently. Bacon’s a bit short, so I said we preferred bully.”
Wally accepted a tin mug of milkless tea with gratitude.
“That’s great,” he said, after a beatific pause, putting down the empty mug. He pushed his cap back from his tired young face, and heaved a great sigh of relief. “Blessings on whoever discovered tea! I don’t think I’ll have any beef, thanks.”
“Yes, you will,” Jim said, firmly. “I know it’s beastly, and one isn’t hungry, but it’s a fool game not to eat. If we have any luck there may be some work to-day; and you can’t fight if you don’t eat something. The first mouthful is the worst.”
His chum took the beef-tin meekly.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “If we only do get a chance of fighting, I should think we’d have enormous appetites afterwards; but one can’t get hungry hiding in this beastly hole and letting Brother Boche sling his tin cans at us. Wouldn’t you give something for a bath and twelve hours’ sleep?”
“By Jove, yes!” Jim agreed. “But I don’t mind postponing them if only we get a smack at those gentry across the way first. Did you see Anstruther?”
“Yes—he’s better. He dodged the R.A.M.C. men—said he wasn’t going to be carted back because of a knock on the head. He’s tied up freshly and looks awfully interesting, but he declares he’s quite fit.”
Captain Anstruther was the company commander, a veteran of one-and-twenty, with eight months’ service. The two Australian boys, nineteen and eighteen respectively, and fully conscious of their own limitations, regarded him with great respect in his official capacity, and, off duty, had clearly demonstrated their ability to dispose of him, with the gloves on, within three rounds. They were exceedingly good friends. Anstruther could tell stories of the Marne, of the retreat from Mons, of the amazing tangle of the first weeks of war, which had left him, then a second lieutenant, in sole command of the remnant of his battalion. To the two Australians he was a mine of splendid information. They were mildly puzzled at what he demanded in return—bush “yarns” of their own country, stories of cattle musterings, of aboriginals, of sheep-shearing by machinery, of bush-fire fighting; even of football as played at their school in Melbourne. To them these things, interesting enough in peacetime and in their own setting, were commonplace and stale in the trenches, with Europe ablaze with battle all round them. Anstruther, however, looked on war with an eye that saw little of romance: willing to see it through, but with no illusions as to its attractions. He greatly preferred to talk of bush-fires, which he had not seen.
Yesterday a shell which had wrecked far too much of a section of trench to be at all comfortable had provided this disillusioned warrior with a means of escape, had he so wished, by knocking him senseless, with a severe scalp-wound. Counselled to seek the dressing-station at the rear, when he had recovered his senses, however, he had flatly declined; all his boredom lost in annoyance at his aching head, and a wild desire to obtain enemy scalps in vengeance. Jim and Wally had administered first-aid with field dressings, and the wounded one, declaring himself immediately cured, had hidden himself and his bandages from any intrusive senior who might be hard-hearted enough to insist on his retirement.
“It was a near thing,” Jim said reflectively.
“So was yours,” stated his chum.
“Oh—my old cap?—a miss is as good as a mile,” said Jim. “I’m glad it wasn’t a bit nearer, though; it would be a bore to be put out of business without ever having seen a German, let alone finding out which of us could ‘get his fist in fust.’ ” He rose, feeling for his pipe. “Have you eaten your whack of that stuff?”
“I’ve done my best,” said Wally, displaying the tin, nearly empty. “Can’t manage any more. Let’s have a walk along the trench and see what’s happening.”
“Well, keep your silly head down,” Jim said. “The parapet is getting more and more uneven, and you never remember you’re six feet.”
Wally grinned. Each of the friends suffered under the belief that he was extremely careful and the other destined to sudden death from unwittingly exposing himself to a German sniper.
“If you followed your own advice, grandmother,” he said; “you being three inches taller, and six times more careless! I always told your father and Norah that you’d be an awful responsibility.”
“I’ll put you under arrest if you’re not civil,” Jim threatened. “Small boys aren’t allowed to be impertinent on active service!”
They floundered along in the mud, ducking whenever the parapet was low: sandbags had run short, and trench-repairing on the previous night had been like making bricks without straw. The men were finishing breakfast, keeping close to the dug-outs, since at any moment the first German shell might scream overhead. The line was very thin; reinforcements, badly enough wanted, were reported to be coming up. Meanwhile the battalion could only hope that the shells would continue to spare them, and that when the enemy came the numbers would be sufficiently even to enable them to put up a good fight.
Captain Anstruther, white-faced under a bandage that showed red stains, nodded to them cheerily.
“Ripping morning, isn’t it?” he said. “Hope you’ve had a pleasant night, Linton!”
Jim grinned, glancing at his hands, which displayed numerous long red scars.
“One’s nights here are first-class training for the career of a burglar later on,” he said. “Mending barbed-wire in the dark is full of unexpected happenings, chiefly unpleasant. I don’t mind the actual mending so much as having to lie flat on one’s face in the mud when a star-shell comes along.”
“Very disorganizing to work,” said another subaltern, Blake, whose mud-plastered uniform showed that he had had his share of lying flat. In private life Blake had belonged to the species “nut,” and had been wont to parade in Bond Street in beautiful raiment. Here, dirty, unshaven and scarcely distinguishable from the muddiest of his platoon, he permitted himself a cheerfulness that Bond Street had never seen.
“Sit down,” Anstruther said. “There are more or less dry sandbags, and business is slack. Why didn’t you fellows come down to mess? Have you had any breakfast?”
“Yes, thanks,” Jim answered. “We fed up there—our men were inclined to give breakfast a miss, so we encouraged them to eat by feeding largely, among them. Nothing like exciting a feeling of competition.”
“Trenches under fire don’t breed good healthy appetites—at any rate until you’re used to them,” Blake remarked.
“The men are bucking up well, all the same,” said Anstruther. “I’m jolly proud of them; it’s a tough breaking-in for fellows who aren’t much more than recruits. They’re steadying down better than I could have hoped they would.”
“Doesn’t the weary old barrack-square grind stand to them now!” said Jim. “They see it, too, themselves; only they’re very keen to put all the bayonet-exercise into practice. Smith, my servant, was the mildest little man you ever saw, at home; now he spends most of the day putting a bloodthirsty edge on his bayonet, and I catch him in corners prodding the air and looking an awful Berserk. They’re all chirping up wonderfully this morning, bless ’em. I shouldn’t wonder if by this time to-morrow they were regarding it all as a picnic!”
“So it is, if you look at it the right way,” said Blake. “Lots of jokes about, too. Did you hear what one of our airmen gave the enemy on April the First? He flew over a crowd behind their lines, and dropped a football. It fell slowly, and Brother Boche took to cover like a rabbit, from all directions. Then it struck the ground and bounced wildly, finally settling to rest: I suppose they thought it was a delay-action fuse, for they laid low for a long time before they dared believe it was not going to explode. So they came out from their shelters to examine it, and found written on it ‘April fool—Gott strafe England!’ ”
His hearers gave way to mirth.
“Good man!” said Anstruther. “But there are lots of mad wags among the flying people. I should think it must make ’em extraordinarily cheerful always to be cutting about in nice clean air, where there isn’t any barbed-wire or mud.”
Feeling grunts came from the others.
“Rather!” said Garrett, another veteran of eight months’ service. “There was one poor chap who had engine-trouble when he was doing a lone reconnaissance, and had to come down behind the German lines. He worked furiously, and just got his machine in going order, when two enemy officers trotted up, armed with revolvers, and took him prisoner. Then they thought it would be a bright idea to make him take them on a reconnaissance over the Allied lines; which design they explained to him in broken English and with a fine display of their portable artillery, making him understand that if he didn’t obey he’d be shot forthwith.”
“But he didn’t!” Wally burst out.
“Just you wait, young Australia—you’re an awful fire-eater!” said the narrator. “The airman thought it over, and came to the conclusion that it would be a pity to waste his valuable life; so he gave in meekly, climbed in, and took his passengers aboard. They went off very gaily, and he gave them a first-rate view of all they wanted to see; and, of course, carrying our colours, he could fly much lower than any German machine could have gone in safety. It was jam for the two Boches; I guess they felt their Iron Crosses sprouting. Their joy only ended—and then it ended suddenly—when he looped the loop!”
The audience jumped.
“What happened?”
“They very naturally fell out.”
“And the airman?” Wally asked, ecstatically.
“He had taken the precaution to strap himself in—unobtrusively. Didn’t I tell you he appreciated his valuable life?” said Garrett, laughing. “He came down neatly where he wanted to, made his report, and sent out a party to give decent burial to two very dead amateur aviators. The force of gravity is an excellent thing to back you up in a tight place, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s something to get one’s chance—and it’s quite another to know when to take advantage of it,” said Anstruther. “I expect an airman has to learn to make up his mind quicker than most of us. But there’s no doubt of the chances that come to some people. A Staff officer was here early this morning, and he was telling me of young Goujon.”
“Who’s he?” queried Blake, lazily.
“He’s a French kid—just seventeen. He was one of a small party sent out to locate some enemy machine-guns that were giving a good deal of trouble. They found ’em, all right; but when they were wriggling their way back a shell came along and wiped out the entire crowd—all except this Goujon kid. He was untouched, and he hid for hours in the crater made by the explosion of the shell. When it got dark he crept out: but by that time he was pretty mad, and instead of getting home, he wanted to get a bit of his own back, and what must he do but crawl to those machine-guns and lob bombs on them!”
“That’s some kid,” said Blake briefly.
“Yes, he was, rather. He destroyed two of the three guns, and then was overpowered—that wouldn’t have taken long!—and made prisoner: pretty roughly handled, too. But before he could be sent to the rear, some of our chaps made a little night-attack on that bit of German trench, and in the excitement Goujon got away. So he trotted home—but on the way he stopped, and gathered up the remaining machine-gun. Staggered into his own lines with it. They’ve given him the Military Medal.”
“Deserved it, too,” was the comment.
“And he’s seventeen!” said some one. “He ought to get pretty high up before the war is over.”
“I know a man who’s a major at nineteen,” Anstruther said, “Went out as a second lieutenant and was promoted for gallantry at Mons; got his captaincy and was wounded at the Aisne; recovered, and at Neuve Chapelle was the sole officer left, except two very junior subalterns, in all his battalion. He handled it in action, brought them out brilliantly—awful corner it was, too,—and was in command for a fortnight after, before they could find a senior man; there weren’t any to spare. He was gazetted major last week.”
“Lucky dog!” said Blake.
“Well, I suppose he is. They say he’s a genius at soldiering, anyhow; and, of course, he got his chance. There must be hundreds of men who would do as well if they ever got it; only opportunity doesn’t come their way.”
“They say this will be a war for young men,” Garrett said. “We’re going back to old days; I believe Wellington and Napoleon were colonels at twenty. And that’s more than you will be, young Meadows, if you don’t mend your ways.”
“I never expected to be,” said Wally, thus attacked.
“But why won’t I, anyhow, apart from obvious reasons?”
“Because you’ll be a neat little corpse,” said Garrett. “What’s this game of yours I hear about?—crawling round on No-Man’s Land at night, and collecting little souvenirs? The souvenir you’ll certainly collect will come from a machine-gun.”
Wally blushed.
“Well, there are such a jolly lot of things there,” he defended himself. “Boche helmets—I’ve got three beauties—and belts, and buckles, and things. People at home like ’em.”
“Presumably people at home like you,” Anstruther said. “But they certainly won’t have you to like if you do it, and it’s possible their affection might even wane for a German helmet that had cost you your scalp. Verboten, Meadows; that’s good German, at any rate. Understand?”
Wally assented meekly. Jim Linton, apparently sublimely unconscious of the conversation, sighed with relief. His chum’s adventurous expeditions had caused him no little anxiety, especially as they were undertaken at a time when his own duties prevented his keeping an eye on the younger boy—which would probably have ended in his accompanying him. From childhood, Jim and Wally had been accustomed to do things in pairs: a habit which had persisted even to sending them together from Australia to join the Army, since Wally was too young for the Australian forces. England was willing to take boys of seventeen; therefore it was manifestly out of the question that Jim should join anywhere but in England, despite his nineteen years. And as Jim’s father and sister were also willing to come to England, the matter had arranged itself as a family affair. Wally Meadows was an orphan, and the Linton family had long included him on a permanent, if informal, basis.
“It’s jolly to get V.C.’s and medals and other ironmongery,” Anstruther was saying; “but I’d like to be the chap who organized the Toy Band on the retreat from Mons. He was a Staff officer, and he found the remains of a regiment, several hundred strong, straggling through a village, just dead beat. The Germans were close on their heels; the British had no officers left, and had quite given up. The Staff chap called on them to make another effort to save themselves, but they wouldn’t—they had been on the run for days, were half-starved, worn out: they didn’t care what happened to them. The officer was at his wits’ end what to do, when his eye fell on a little bit of a shop—you know the usual French village store, with all sorts of stuff in the window: and there he saw some toy drums and penny whistles. He darted in and bought some: came out and induced two or three of the less exhausted men to play them—it’s said he piped on one penny whistle himself, only he won’t admit it now. But you know what the tap of a drum will do on a route-march when the men are getting tired. He roused the whole regiment with his fourpence-worth of band and brought them back to their brigade next day—never lost a man!”
“Jolly good work,” said Blake.
“He won’t get anything for it, of course,” said Anstruther. “You don’t get medals for playing tin whistles; and anyhow, there was no one to report it. But—yes, I’d like to have been that chap.” He rose and stretched himself, taking advantage of a section of undamaged parapet. “Brother Boche is rather late in beginning his hate this morning, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps he’s given up hating as a bad job,” Wally suggested.
“We’ll miss the dear old thing if he really means to leave us alone,” said Anstruther. “Just as well if he does, though: our line is painfully thin, and it’s evident to anyone that our guns are short of ammunition: we’re giving them about one shell to twenty of theirs. And don’t they know it! They send us enormous doses of high-explosive shells, and in return we tickle them feebly with a little shrapnel. They must chuckle!”
“I suppose England will wake up and make munitions for us when we’re all wiped out,” said Garrett, scornfully. “They’re awfully cheery over there: theatres and restaurants packed, business as usual, bull-dog grit, and all the rest of it: Parliament yapping happily, and strikes twice a week. And our chaps trying to fight for ’em, and dying for want of ammunition to do it with. I suppose they think we’re rather lazy not to make it in our spare time!”
“I’m afraid they won’t appoint me dictator just yet,” Blake remarked. “If they would, I’d have every striker and slacker out here: not to fight, but to mend barbed-wire, clean up trenches, and do the general dirty work. First-rate tonic for a disgruntled mind. And I’d send what was left of them to the end of the world afterwards. Will you have them in Australia, Linton?”
“Thanks; we’ve plenty of troubles of our own,” Jim returned hastily. “Don’t you think we were dumping-ground for your rubbish for long enough?”
“You were a large, empty place, and you had to be peopled,” said Blake, grinning. “And a good many of them were very decent people, I believe.”
“Well, they might well be,” Jim responded—“you sent them out for stealing a sheep or a shirt or a medicine-bottle: one poor kid of six was sent out for life for stealing jam-tarts. Many excellent men must have begun life by stealing jam-tarts: I did, myself!”
“If you’re a sample of the after-effects, I don’t wonder we exported the other criminals early,” laughed Blake.
“Well, if any of their descendants grew into the chaps that landed at Gallipoli the other day, they were no bad asset,” said Anstruther. “By Jove, those fellows must be fighters, Linton! I wouldn’t care to have the job of holding them back.”
“I knew they’d fight,” said Jim briefly. Down in his quiet soul he was torn between utter pride in his countrymen, and woe that he had not been with them in that stern Gallipoli landing: the latter emotion firmly repressed. It had been the fight of his boyish dreams—wild charging, hand to hand work, a fleeing enemy: not like this hole-and-corner trench existence unseen by the unseen foe, with Death that could not be combated dropping from the sky. His old school-fellows had been at Gallipoli, and had “made good.” He ached to have been with them.
An orderly came up hurriedly. Anstruther tore open the note he carried.
“There’s word of an enemy attack,” he said crisply. “Get to your places—quick!”
The subalterns scattered along the trench, each to his platoon. They had already inspected the men, making sure that no detail of armament had been forgotten, and that rifles were all in order. Garrett, who commanded the machine-gun section, fled joyfully to the emplacement, his face like a happy child’s. The alarm ran swiftly up and down the trench: low, sharp words of command brought every man to his place, while the sentries, like statues, were glued to their peep-holes. Jim and Wally fingered their revolvers, scarcely able to realize that the time for using them had come at last. Field officers appeared, hurriedly scanning every detail of preparation, and giving a word of advice here and there.
“Thank ’eving, we’re going to have a look-in!” muttered a man in front of Jim: a grizzled sergeant with the two South African ribbons on his breast. “Steady there, young ’Awkins; don’t go meddlin’ with that trigger of yours. You’ll get a chanst of loosin’ off pretty soon.”
“Cawn’t come too soon for me!” said Hawkins, in a throaty whisper, fondling his rifle lovingly. “They got me best pal yesterday.”
“Then keep your ’ead cool till the time comes to mention wot you think of ’em,” returned the sergeant.
Jim and Wally found a chink in the sandbag parapet, and looked out eagerly ahead. All was quiet. The sparrows, made bold by the extraordinary peace of the morning, still chirped and twittered on No-Man’s Land. No sound came from the German trenches beyond. Here and there a faint smoke-wreath curled lazily into the air, telling of cooking-fires and breakfast.
“How do they know they’re coming?” Wally whispered.
“Aeroplane reconnaissance, I suppose,” Jim answered, pointing to two or three specks floating in the blue overhead, far out of reach of the anti-aircraft guns. “They’ve been hovering up there all the morning. Feeling all right, Wal?”
“Fit as a fiddle. I suppose I’ll be in a blue funk presently, but just now I feel as if I were going to a picnic.”
“So do I—and the men are keen as mustard. I thought little Wilson would be useless; you know how jumpy he’s been since we came here. But look at him, there; he’s as steady and cool as any sergeant. They’re good boys,” said the subaltern, who was not yet twenty.
“Mind your ’ead, sir!” came in an agonized whisper from a corporal below; and Jim ducked obediently under the lee of the parapet.
“It’s quite hot,” he said, peering again through his peep-hole. “There’s a jolly breeze springing up, though.”
The breeze came softly over No-Man’s Land, fluttering the wings of the cheerful sparrows. Across the scarred strip of grass a low, green cloud wavered upwards. It grew more solid, spreading in a dense wall over the parapet of the German trench.
“What on earth——?” Jim began.
The green cloud seemed to hesitate. Then the wind freshened a little, and it suddenly blew forward across No-Man’s Land, growing denser as it came. Before it, the sparrows fled suddenly, darting to the upper air with shrill chirpings of alarm. But one bird, taken unawares, beat his wings wildly for a moment, flying forward. Then he pitched downwards and the cloud rolled over him.
“What is it?” uttered Wally.
Before the parapet of the British trench ahead of them the cloud stood for a moment, and then toppled bodily into the trench. It fell as water falls like a heavy thing. From its green depths came hoarse shouts, and rifles suddenly went off in an irregular fusillade. Then the cloud rolled over, leaving the trench full of vapour, and stole towards the second British line.
A great cry came ringing down the trench.
“Gas! It’s their filthy gas!”
It was a new thing, and no one was prepared for it. Across the Channel, England was shuddering over the first reports of the asphyxiating gas attacks, and the women of England were working night and day at the first half-million respirators to be sent out to the troops. But to the men in the trenches there had come only vague rumours of what the French and Canadians had suffered: and they had been slow to believe. It was not easy to realize, unseeing, the full horror of that most malignant device with which Science had blackened War. A few of the officers had respirators—dry, and comparatively useless. The men were utterly unprotected. Like sheep waiting for the slaughter they stood rigidly at attention, waiting for the evil green cloud that blew towards them, already poisoning the clean air with its noxious fumes.
“Tie your handkerchiefs round your mouths and nostrils!” Jim Linton shouted. “Quick, Wally!”
He caught at the younger boy’s handkerchief and knotted it swiftly. The corporal shook his head.
“Most of ’em ain’t got no ’ankerchers, sir,” he said grimly. “They will clean their rifles with ’em.”
Then came another cry.
“Look out—they’re coming!”
Dimly, behind the cloud of gas, they could see shadowy forms clambering over the parapet of the enemy trench; German soldiers, unreal and horrible in their hideous respirators, with great goggle eyes of talc. Ahead, the quick spit of machine-guns broke out spitefully; and, as if in answer, Garrett’s Maxims opened fire. Then the gas was upon them: falling from above over the parapet, stealing like a live thing down the communication trench that led from the first line, where already the Germans were swarming. Men were choking, gasping, fighting for air; dropping their rifles as they tore at their collars, losing their heads altogether in the horror of the silent attack. A little way down the trench Anstruther was trying to rally them, his voice only audible for a few yards. Jim echoed him.
“Come on, boys! it’s better in the open. Let’s get at them!”
He sprang up over the parapet, Wally at his side. There were bullets whistling all round them, but the air was more free—it was Paradise compared to the agony of suffocation in the trench. Some of the men followed. Jim leaped back again, dragging at others; pushing, striking, threatening; anything to get them up above, where at least they might die fighting, not like rats in a hole. He was voiceless, inarticulate; he could only point upwards, and force them over the parapet and into the bullet-swept space. Wally was there—was Wally killed? Then he saw him beside him in the trench, dragging at little Private Wilson, who had fallen senseless. Together they lifted him and flung him out at the rear, turning to fight with other men who had given up and were leaning against the walls, choking. Above them Anstruther was getting the men into some semblance of formation to meet the oncoming rush of Germans. He called to them sharply, authoritatively.
“Linton!—Meadows! Come out at once!”
Jim tried to obey. Then he saw that Wally was staggering, and flung his arm round him; but the arm was suddenly limp and helpless, and Wally pitched forward on his face and lay still, gasping. Jim tried to drag him up, fighting with the powerlessness that was creeping over him. Behind him the roar of artillery grew faint in his ears and died away, though still he seemed to hear the steady spit of Garrett’s machine-guns. He sagged downwards. Then black, choking darkness rushed upon him, and he fell across the body of his friend.
“Jim Linton sat on a small box outside his dug-out . . .”
CHAPTER II
YELLOW ENVELOPES
“London’s smoke hides all the stars from me,
Light from mine eyes and Heaven from my heart.”
Dora Wilcox.
THE lift came gliding on its upward journey in a big London hotel, far too slowly for the impatience of its only passenger, a tall girl of sixteen, with a mop of brown curls, and grey eyes alight with excitement. Ordinarily, Norah Linton was rather pale, especially in London, where the air is largely composed of smoke, and has been breathed in and out of a great number of people until it is nearly worn out; but just now there was a scarlet spot on each cheek, and her mouth broke into smiles as though it could not help itself. At Floor No. 4, a fat old lady threatened to stop the lift, but decided at the last moment that she preferred to walk upstairs. At No. 5, no one was in sight, and Norah sighed with audible relief, and ejaculated, “Thank goodness!” At No. 6, two men were seen hurrying along the corridor some distance away, and shouting, “Lift!” But at this point the lift-boy, to whom Norah’s impatience had communicated itself, behaved like Nelson when he applied his telescope to his blind eye, and shot upwards, disregarding the shouts of his would-be passengers; and, passing by No. 7 as though it were not there, brought the lift to an abrupt halt at No. 8, flinging the door open with a rattle and a triumphant, “There y’are, miss!”
“Thank you!” said Norah, flashing at him a grateful smile that sent the lift-boy earthwards in a state of mind that made him loftily oblivious of the reproaches of neglected passengers. She was out of the lift with a quick movement, and in the empty corridor broke into a run. Her flying feet carried her swiftly to a sitting-room some distance away, and she burst in like a whirlwind. “Dad! Daddy!”
There was no one there, and with an exclamation of impatience she turned and ran once more, far too excited now to care whether any Londoners were there to be shocked at the spectacle of a daughter of Australia racing along an hotel corridor. She had not far to go; a turn brought her face to face with a tall man, lean and grizzled, who cast a glance at her that took in the crumpled yellow envelope in her hand.
No one with a soldier son looked calmly on telegrams in those days, and David Linton’s face changed abruptly. “What is it, Norah?”
“They’re coming,” said Norah, and suddenly found a huge lump in her throat that would not go away. She put out a hand and clung to her father’s coat. “They’re truly coming, daddy!”
Her father’s voice was not as steady as usual.
“They’re all right?”
“Oh, yes, they must be. It says ‘Better—London to-morrow.’ ”
“Better?” mused Mr. Linton. “I wonder if that means hospital or us, Norah?”
Norah’s face fell.
“I suppose it may be hospital,” she said. “It was so lovely to think they were coming that I nearly forgot that part of it. Can we find out, daddy?”
“We’ll go and try,” Mr. Linton said.
“Now?” said Norah, and jigged on one foot.
“I’ll get my hat,” said her father, departing with a step not so unlike his daughter’s. Norah waited in the corridor for a few minutes, and then, impatient beyond the possibility of further waiting in silence, followed him to his room, there finding him endeavouring to remove London mud-stains from a trouser-leg.
“You might think when you’ve managed to brush it off that it had gone—but indeed it hasn’t,” said David Linton, wrathfully regarding gruesome stains and brushing them with a vigour that should have been productive of better results.
“It does cling,” remarked Norah, comprehendingly. “I’ll sponge it for you, daddy; those stains never yield to mild measures. Daddy, do you think they’ll be long getting better?”
Anyone else might have been excused for thinking she meant the mud-stains. But David Linton made no such mistake.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “One hears such different stories about that filthy German gas. It all depends on the size of the dose they got, I fancy. Jim said it was mild; but then Jim would say a good deal to avoid frightening us.”
“And he was able to write. But Wally hasn’t written.”
“No; and that doesn’t look well. He’s such a good lad—it’s quite likely he’d write and let us know all he could about Jim. But I don’t fancy the doctors would let them travel unless they were pretty well.”
“I suppose not. Oh, doesn’t it seem ages until to-morrow, dad!”
“It’ll come, if you give it time,” said her father. “However—yes, it does seem a pretty long time, Norah.” They laughed at each other.
“It doesn’t do a bit of good for you to put on that wise air,” Norah said, “because I know exactly how you feel, and that’s just the same as I do. And anyone would be the same who had two boys at the Front like Jim and Wally.”
“I think they would,” said her father, abandoning as untenable the position of age and wisdom. “Thank goodness they will be back with us to-morrow, at any rate.” He put his clothes-brush on the table and stood up, tall and thin and a little grim. “It seems a long while since they went away.”
“Long!” Norah echoed, expressively. It was in reality only a month since her brother Jim and his chum had said good-bye on the platform at Victoria Station; and in some ways it seemed only a few minutes since the train had moved slowly out, with the laughing boyish faces framed in the window. But each slow day, with its dragging weight of anxiety, had been a lifetime. To them had come what the whole world had learned to know; the shiver of fear on opening the green envelopes from the Front; the racking longing for the news; the sick dread at the sight of a telegram—even at the sound of an unusual knock. David Linton had grown silent and grim; Norah felt an old woman, and the care-free Australian life which was all she had known seemed a world away—vanished as completely as the Australian tan had faded from her cheeks.
Now it was all over, and for a while, at any rate, they could forget. Jim had so managed that no shock came to them—the cheery telegram he had contrived to send before being taken to hospital had reached them two days earlier than the curt War Office intimation that both boys were suffering from gas-poisoning. Jim did not mean that they should ever know what it had meant to send it. The cavalry subaltern who had helped him along to the dressing-station had been very kind; he had contrived to hear the address, even in the choked, strangling whisper, which was all the voice the gas had left to Jim; had even suggested a wording that would tell without alarming, and had put aside almost angrily Jim’s struggle to find his money. “Don’t you worry,” he had said, “it’ll go. I’ve seen other chaps gassed, and you’ll be all right soon.” He was a cheery pink and white youngster: Jim was sorry he had not found out his name. In the hard days and nights that followed, his face hovered round his half-conscious dreams—curiously like a little lad who had fagged for him at school in Melbourne.
That was two weeks ago, and of those two weeks Mr. Linton and Norah fortunately knew little. Wally had been the worst; Jim had been dragged out of the gassed trench a few minutes earlier than his friend, and possibly to the younger boy the shock had been greater. When the first terrible paroxysms passed, he could only lie motionless, endeavouring to conjure up a faint ghost of his old smile when Jim’s anxious face peered at him from the next bed. Neither had any idea at all of how they had reached the hospital at Boulogne; all their definite memories ended abruptly when that evil-smelling green cloud had rolled like a wave above them into the trench.
Out of the first dark mist of choking suffering they had passed slowly into comparative peace, broken now and then by recurring attacks, but, by contrast, a very haven of tranquillity. They were very tired and lazy: it was heavenly to lie there, quite still, and watch the blue French sky through the window and the kind-faced nurses flitting about—each doing far too much for her strength, but always cheery. They did not want to talk—their voices had gone somewhere very far off; all they wanted was just to be quiet; not to move, not to talk, not to cough. Then, as the clean vigour of their youth reasserted itself, and strength came back to them, energy woke once more, and with it their old-time lively hatred of bed. They begged to be allowed to get up; and as their places were badly needed for men worse than they, the doctors granted their prayer—after which they would have been extremely glad to get back again, only that pride forbade their admitting it.
Moreover, there was London; and London, with all that it meant to them, was worth a struggle. Two months earlier it had bored them exceedingly, and nothing had seemed worth while, with the call in their blood to be out in the trenches. Now, after actual experience of the trenches, their ideas had undergone a violent change. The romance of war had faded utterly. The Flying Corps might retain it still—those plucky fighting men who soared and circled overhead, bright specks in the clouds and the blue sky; but to the men who grubbed underground amid discomfort, smells, and dirt, to which actual fighting came as a blessed relief, war had lost all its glamour. They wanted to see the job through. But London was coming first, and it had blossomed suddenly into a paradise.
Some of which Jim had tried to put into his shaky pencilled notes; and the certainty of their boys’ gladness to get back lay warm at the hearts of Norah and her father as they walked along Piccadilly. Spring was in the air: the Park had been full of people, the Row crowded with happy children, scurrying up and down the tan on their ponies, with decorous grooms endeavouring to keep them in sight. The window-boxes in the clubs were gay with daffodils and hyacinths: the busy, knowing London sparrows twittered noisily in the budding trees, making hurried arrangements for setting up housekeeping in the summer. Even though war raged so close to England, and its shadow lay on every hearth, nothing could quite dim the gladness of London’s awakening to the Spring.
“Those fellows all look so happy,” said Mr. Linton, indicating a motor-car crammed with wounded men in their blue hospital suits and scarlet ties. “One never sees a discontented face among them. I hope our boys will look as happy, Norah.”
“If there is any chance of looking happy, Jim and Wally will take it!” said Norah, firmly.
“I think they will,” said her father, laughing. “The difficulty is to imagine them ill.”
“Yes, isn’t it? Do you remember when those horrid Zulus battered them about so badly in Durban, how extraordinary it was to see them both in bed, looking pale?”
“Well, I think it was the first time it had occurred to either of them,” said Mr. Linton.
“I suppose one could never realize the awful effects of the gas unless one actually saw it,” Norah said. “But I can’t help feeling glad, if they had to be hurt, that it was that: not wounds or—crippling.” Her voice fell on the last word. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of Jim or Wally being crippled.”
“Don’t!” said her father, sharply. “Please God, they’ll come out of it without that. And as for the gas—Jim assured us they would be all right, but I’ll be glad when I talk to a doctor about them myself.”
Inquiries proved disappointing. It was certain that the boys would not be allowed to return directly to them. They would travel in hospital trains and a hospital ship; it was difficult to say where men would be taken, when so many, broken and helpless, were being brought to England every day. The Victorian Agent-General was sympathetic and helpful; he promised to find out all that could be found from the overworked authorities, and to let them know at the earliest possible moment.
“But I fancy that long son of yours will find a way of letting you know himself, Mr. Linton,” he said. “I’ll do my best—but I wouldn’t mind betting he gets ahead of me.”
They came out of the building that is a kind of oasis in London to all homesick Victorians, pausing, as they always did, to look at the exhibits in the outer office—wool and wheat and timber, big model gold nuggets, and the shining fruits that spoke of the orchards on the hillsides at home; with pictures of wide pastures where sleek cattle stood in the knee-high grass, or reapers and binders whirred through splendid crops. It was a little patch of Australia, planted in the very heart of London; hard to realize that just outside the swinging glass doors the grey city—history suddenly become a live thing—stretched away eastward, and, to the west, the roaring Strand carried its mighty burden of traffic.
“I’ll always be glad I had the chance of seeing London,” said Norah. “But whenever I come here I know how glad I’ll be to go back!”
“I know that without coming here,” said her father, drily. “It would be jolly if we could take those boys home to get strong, Norah.”
“To Billabong?” said Norah, wistfully. “Oh-h! But we’ll do it some day, daddy.”
“I trust so. Won’t there be a scene when we get back!”
“Oh, I dream about it!” said Norah. “And I wake up all homesick. Can’t you picture Brownie, dad!—she’ll have cooked everything any of us ever liked, and the house will be shining from top to bottom, and there won’t be a thing different—I know she dusts your old pipes and Jim’s stockwhips herself every day! And Murty will have the horses jumping out of their skins with fitness, and Lee Wing’s garden will be something marvellous.”
“And Billy,” said David Linton, laughing. “Can’t you see his black face—and his grin!”
“Oh, and the great wide paddocks—the view from the verandah, across the lagoon and looking right over the plains! I don’t seem to have looked at anything far away since we came off the ship,” said Norah; “all the views are shut in by houses, and the air is so thick one couldn’t see far, in any case!”
“They tell me there’s clear air in Ireland,” said her father.
“Then I want to go there,” responded his daughter, promptly.
“Well—we might do worse than that. I’ve been thinking a good deal, Norah; if the boys don’t get well quickly—and I believe few of the gassed men do—we shall have to take them away somewhere for a change.”
“Certainly,” agreed Norah. “We couldn’t keep them in London.”
“No, of course not. Country air and not too many people; that is the kind of tonic our boys will want. What would you think of going to Ireland?”
Norah drew a long breath of delight.
“Oh-h!” she said. “You do make the most beautiful plans, daddy! We’ve always wanted to go there more than anywhere: and war wouldn’t seem so near to us there, and we could try to make the boys forget gas and trenches and shells and all sorts of horrors.”
“That’s just it,” said her father. “The wisest doctor I ever knew used to say that change of environment was worth far more than change of air; we might try to manage both for them, Norah. Donegal was your mother’s country: I’ve been meaning to go there. She loved it till the day she died.”
In the tumult of the Strand Norah slipped a hand into her father’s. Very seldom did he speak of the one who was always in his memory: the little mother who had grown tired, and had slipped out of life when Norah was a baby.
“Let’s go there, daddy,” she begged.
“We’ll consult the boys,” said Mr. Linton. “Eh, but it’s good to think we shall have them to consult with to-morrow! You know, Norah, since Jim left school, I’ve become so used to consulting him on all points, that I feel a lost old man without him.”
“You’ll never be old!” said his daughter, indignantly. “But Jim just loves you to talk to him the way you do,—I know he does, only, of course, he’s quite unable to say so.”
“Jim has lots of sense,” said Jim’s father. “So has Wally, for that matter: there is plenty of shrewdness hidden somewhere in that feather-pate of his. They’re very reliable boys. I was ‘thinking back’ the other night, and I don’t remember ever having been really angry with Jim in my life.”
“I should think not!” said Norah, regarding him with wide eyes of amazement. “Why would you be angry with him?”
“Why, I don’t know,” said her father rather helplessly. “Jim never was a pattern sort of boy.”
“No, but he had sense,” said Norah. She began to laugh. “Oh, I don’t know how it is,” she said. “We’ve all been mates always: and mates don’t get angry with each other, or they wouldn’t be mates.”
“I suppose that’s it,” Mr. Linton said, accepting this comprehensive description of a bush family standpoint. “There’s a ’bus that will go our way, Norah: I’ve had enough of elbowing my way through this crowd.”
They climbed on top of the motor-’bus, and found the front seat empty; and when Norah was on the front seat of a ’bus she always felt that it was her own private equipage and that she owned London. To their left was the huge yard of Charing Cross Station, crowded with taxis and cabs and private motors, with streams of foot passengers pouring in and out of the gateways. At Charing Cross one may see in five minutes more foreigners than one meets in many hours in other parts of London, and this was especially the case since the outbreak of war. Homesick Belgian refugees were wont to stray there, to watch the stream of passengers from the incoming Continental trains, hoping against hope that they might see some familiar face. There were soldiers of many nations; unfamiliar uniforms were dotted throughout the crowd, besides the khaki that coloured every London street. Even from the ’bus-top could be heard snatches of talk in many languages—save only one often heard in former days: German. A string of recruits, each wearing the King’s ribbon, swung into the station under a smart recruiting sergeant: a cheery little band, apparently relieved that the plunge had at last been taken, and that they were about to shoulder their share of the nation’s work.
“Not a straight pair of shoulders among the lot,” remarked Mr. Linton, surveying them critically. “It’s pleasant to think that very soon they will be almost as well set up as that fellow in the lead. War is going to do a big work in straightening English shoulders—morally and physically.”
The ’bus gave a violent jerk, after the manner of ’buses in starting, and moved on through the crowded street, threading its way in and out of the traffic in the most amazing fashion—finding room to squeeze its huge bulk through chinks that looked small for a donkey-cart to pass, and showing an agility in dodging that would have done credit to a hare. It rocked on its triumphal way westward: past the crouching stone lions in Trafalgar Square, where the plinth of the Nelson Column blazed with recruiting posters; past the “Orient” offices, with their big pictures of Australian-going steamers—which made Norah sigh; and so up to Piccadilly Circus, where they found themselves packed into a jam of traffic so tight that it seemed that it could never disentangle. But presently it melted away, and they went on round the stately curve of Regent Street, with its glittering shops; and so home to the hotel—where they had lived so long that it really seemed almost home—and to their own sitting-room, gay with daffodils and primroses, and littered with work. Norah’s knitting—khaki socks and mufflers—lay here and there, and there was a pile of finished articles awaiting dispatch to the Red Cross headquarters in the morning. Under the window, a big, workmanlike deal table was littered with scraps of wood, curiously fashioned, with tools in a neat rack. It was David Linton’s workshop; all the time he could spare from helping with wounded soldiers went to the fashioning of splints and crutches for the hospitals, where so many were needed every day.
A yellow envelope was on the table now, lying across a splint.
“Duke of Clarence Hospital,” it said; “to-morrow afternoon.—Jim.”
